Chapter 22
BRAD HAD RECOGNIZED THE NAME—LeRoux—in Bill Sander’s file, had drunk the company’s wines on occasion, and he’d checked out the address, standard precaution. The discreetly elegant pied-á-terre in Lyon led him to a hulking castle surrounded by working vineyards. If Evan didn’t get himself killed in the short run, he figured he might like something like that for himself one day, but this wasn’t the time. Lily was waiting for him at home.
The lords of Ariton found things, hidden in an attic or a database, it didn’t make much difference. Lily was as good as Evan with a computer and neither of them worried about the legal niceties, so he wasn’t surprised when he found her sitting on the burgundy leather couch in their private study, the laptop computer open on the beaten brass coffee table.
She handed him a list of businesses, including a small but exclusive trade in gems, that the LeRoux family had its hand in one way or another. They’d sunk most of their money into the grapes, though.
“They have a website.” She turned the computer so that he could see the screen, filled with an interior shot of the castle, sepia tones with a splash of light on a display case. The company had a small museum and gave public tours of the vineyards on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She clicked a link to a general inquiry for a short list of artifacts spanning centuries. No arcana on the list, and he didn’t see Mark Shields’ ruby on there either, but the museum’s web page had a contact number and a general request for information leading to the acquisition of objects with a connection to the company’s history. All very public and aboveboard, but Lily wasn’t finished.
“Numbered Swiss bank account, which isn’t much of a surprise,” she said. “The bank is private and goes back a lot farther than the Banking Secrecy Act but the account seems to have been dormant for at least twenty years. Until today. No movement yet, just a notice that the bank should expect to move a large sum.”
They knew the LeRoux name had ties to Grayson Donne’s line going back to the Black Death, so Brad hadn’t ruled out trouble as an option. But humans had short memories. Donne had been dead for three years and the company hadn’t renewed its inquiry on the ruby for a lot longer than that, had given no indication that it was aware of the recently deceased Donne at all. An inquiry going back more than twenty years didn’t even make it a coincidence. Nothing out of the ordinary except the wine and that notice of an impending transfer of funds. But he wasn’t taking any chances.
The limousine pulled up at the curb at precisely three o’clock. Lily waited in the Federal period office where they met clients. In his daemon form, Badad watched from the general direction of the corner of Spruce and Seventh Streets, above the house. Evan had told him once that they sometimes made a ripple in the air like heat rising from the roof, but the day was warm so that shouldn’t matter.
LeRoux Cie could be exactly what it seemed, a company with a long-standing policy of buying back its history when the opportunity allowed. Bradley, Ryan and Davis had a few of them on their client list. Maybe after today they’d have another one.
Or, maybe not. The driver stepped away from the limousine, alert, with one hand brushing his jacket near a suspicious break in the fall from the shoulder. If he was going to carry that much firepower, he needed a better tailor. The second bodyguard didn’t pretend to be anything else. He stepped out of the front passenger-side door and glanced up and down the street, a narrow, tree- lined mix of sixties modern and age-softened Federal that had been there since George Washington had walked the city, which seemed to mean a lot to Evan. Brad hadn’t ever met the man, but he liked the comfortable way the street had settled into itself. The bodyguard just seemed annoyed by all the trees.
He wasn’t sure why LeRoux was expecting mayhem on a quiet city street. Wednesday, midday, there were a few students heading for the medical school with their own purposeful strides and one deaf old neighbor navigating the rumpled brick sidewalk to water the flower baskets hanging from the Franklin lampposts. Normal. The second bodyguard let his hand fall from the holster at his belt, opened the limousine’s back door, and waited.
A black walking stick with a brass grip appeared first, planting a firm hold on the street. Then a small, frail-looking old woman with pure white hair followed. The bodyguard took her arm to help her over the curb; it seemed to distress the woman, but he didn’t let go.
A priest climbed out after her. Middle-aged, close-cropped steely hair. Might have been a soldier once. He had Jesuit eyes, glanced around to take in the neighborhood, and looked up—stared right at the space Badad had taken for perspective. That was trouble. The priest said nothing, gave no indication that he’d seen anything, just took the guard’s place at the woman’s side and helped her up the two low steps to the door.
Badad decided it was time to become Kevin Bradley again. Lily was going to need backup. Or maybe the priest would. He knew the suit he wanted, and the shirt and tie, let Carlo Pimi’s fine tropical wool settle him into his wealthy businessman identity. Then he opened the door from the house to the formal office, back to its spare but gracious order yet still smelling faintly of paint.
Chapter 23
“PLEASE, HAVE A SEAT.” Lily offered a chilled version of her usual professional smile.
“Thank you for seeing us.” The old woman sat at rigid right angles in her chair, sunlight from the garden window glinting off the white of her hair. She wore a dark green suit too warm for the day. Brad recognized the tailoring as couture, not new but probably worth more now than when she bought it. She faced Lily with a level gaze over the smooth expanse of antique desk. In the chair beside her, the priest fingered the cross he wore at his throat. His gaze had sharpened when Brad entered from the house. This close, it was easier to see the family resemblance. No bodyguards, but Brad heard breathing in the outer office, so they hadn’t gone far. It didn’t look like either of them was going to hurry things along.
Brad stood behind Lily’s chair, feet planted, arms crossed, with a slight, ambiguously non-threatening smile. Not even a priest could recognize a daemon lord’s corporeal form from a wavering heat pattern over the house. It was impossible. But this priest saw something, studied him with narrow-eyed calculation. For a moment, light flickered in his eyes and Brad wondered. . . . But it was just sunlight glancing off the garden wall.
The old woman gave them both a puzzled look, but when no explanation was forthcoming, she returned her attention to Lily, who offered a frost-tipped smile and a hand across the desk. “Lily Ryan,” she said. “And this is my partner, Kevin Bradley.”
“Bertrande LeRoux.” The woman clasped Lily’s fingers briefly in a gnarled hand, her smile more polite than Lily’s, and more strained. “And this is my—Father Michel. Father Michel LeRoux.” She touched the priest’s sleeve, a proprietary gesture.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice, but you needn’t have made the trip. We could have come to you.” Lily leaned over the desk and offered a bit of cleavage when she extended her hand to the priest. He didn’t take it. Not the hand or the glimpse of Lily’s breasts. Didn’t take his hand off the cross at his throat.
“Do we have a problem here?” she asked him. Beneath her professional cool smoldered a rage that never boded well for any of them. Brad didn’t think that either LeRoux had seen it. They didn’t know she hated priests. A priest had bound her once in a Russian forest and she had little faith in any of them.
Madame LeRoux briefly tightened her hold on Father Michel’s arm, restraint or reassurance, it was difficult to tell, but she let go to wave away Lily’s earlier concerns. “It wasn’t far—we arrived in New York last week. When I heard that the Lyon ruby had surfaced, it seemed like fate. We could not stay away.” Her accent was thickly French, her grammar flawless. She hesitated over the word “fate” but moved on quickly. “Mr. Sanders said that you have it? And you are willing to sell?”
“For our client, who wishes to guard his privacy,” Lily agreed. She didn’t pull out the velvet- lined
box, though, and Brad wondered if the agency could afford to buy the stone if Lily decided to keep it out of the hands of humans. They couldn’t incur a host-debt over it, so they’d have to pay fair value.
The priest was looking up, tracking the outline of the pentagram hidden in the ornate plaster medallion on the ceiling. “Interesting design,” he said, interrupting with a passing glance at Lily and a more pointed one for Brad before he returned his attention to the ceiling. “And recently repaired. Did your client do that?”
“He offered,” Lily confided, and it didn’t sound quite as true as it actually was. “He’s a bit eccentric that way. But we felt his efforts were better spent elsewhere.”
“I meant the damage.”
“It’s an old building.” She blinked and looked more convincingly confused.
Brad couldn’t help wondering what the priest would make of Matt Shields. Didn’t, on reflection, want to find out.
But Lily waved off any further discussion of the ceiling. They had a deal with Paimon that required, as a first step, exchanging Matt Shields’ ruby for a large sum of money. The agency did well, but they couldn’t come up with that much in the time they had, so Bertrande LeRoux’s money would have to do. “Would you like to see the stone?”
“You do have documentation?” Madame LeRoux leaned forward, eager. The priest flicked a glance over Lily, but he seemed to decide his charge was safe in that direction and returned to mapping the protective seal worked into the plaster on the ceiling.
“Of the jewel’s authenticity and general description,” Lily opened the desk drawer, drew out the velvet case. “As Bill Sanders will have told you, for personal reasons the client prefers not to share the details of its origin and early provenance that you reasonably would expect under the circumstances. He understands that decision will affect the price. But the jewel fits the description and would appear to fit the age as well.”
“Then the original documentation does exist?” Madame LeRoux picked up the box, opened it. “There is a painting in our vaults,” she said. “A miniature of a prince of Kashmir with the ruby at his throat. We have no record of his name—company history reports that his brother murdered him to eliminate the competition soon after the painting was made. This is the same stone.”
The priest finished with the ceiling and resumed his study of Brad, as if he held the answers to the universe, which he did, more or less. But he didn’t want to antagonize the only buyer they had for the ruby, so he waited. Which was a mistake.
“Adiuro te, Satan,” the priest said, “hostis humanae salutis . . .”
I adjure you, Satan, enemy of human salvation . . .
Father Michel LeRoux was an exorcist. Wonderful.
Chapter 24
“IT’S A LOT OF HOUSE.” Carlos Sanchez—the Carlos Sanchez, Evan guessed, who would inherit all those rubies when Matt Shields went home—was waiting on the front porch that wrapped the Victorian monstrosity of a house. “You must be Evan Davis. Matt said you might want to talk to me.” Sanchez was an inch or two shorter than Evan. Squint lines radiated from the corners of his eyes but didn’t give away much about his age—anywhere between forty and sixty, maybe. He had dark hair with no gray in it, neatly trimmed. The mustache, also neatly trimmed, did have a few stray grays. His hands rested casually in the pockets of his Dockers.
Evan nodded, accepting the offer, and mirrored the stance, hands hooked on pockets. “So what was Matt Shields doing here anyway?” he asked.
“General maintenance, minor plumbing jobs, painting. He started on one of my landscape crews, but my son came back from college, wanted to branch out. It’s all that fancy business education these days. Diversify, as if the grass will stop growing, or branches will stop falling from the trees.” He shook his head, but he was smiling when he said it. “Matt thought he might like to try his hand at that kind of work, and he took to it right away.”
Evan nodded back—mirror moves, “we’re in synch” moves—to keep Sanchez talking. “Still, there doesn’t seem much here to keep him.” Shields had a radius of ninety miles to work with, and New York City fell within it.
“Well, there was the girl.”
“What girl?”
“Oh, a pretty little thing. Skinny. Rich guys seem to like them scrawny. Skin smooth like milk chocolate.” Sanchez got a faraway look in his eyes, not seeing the scenery, Evan figured, and wondered what memory was playing against a ridge of the Catskills rising low in the background. “Kady, I think Matt called her,” Sanchez said, “never mentioned a last name. You used to see her in the side gardens sometimes, or passing by an upstairs window. Mr. Donne never let her go far. Never let either of them go far. She disappeared right before Mr. Donne had his heart attack. We never found her. I thought maybe she saw her chance and just left, walked out to the road and hitched a ride to the city. Matt didn’t believe it, and he wouldn’t leave without her. I told him to call the police, but he wouldn’t, begged me not to. I think—”
Sanchez hesitated, and Evan didn’t ask him to betray a trust. He’d have to come to that himself. But he offered reassurance, “I’ve heard pretty much everything in this job—there’s nothing you can say that will make me think less of Matt Shields.” Didn’t say how he felt now, but it was the truth—his father had killed fifty people in a towering rage and he still counted his world fortunate that Brad had pulled his punch, so to speak. Matt Shields couldn’t shock him.
Something in the way he said it, or maybe his own long stare into the past, seemed to decide Carlos Sanchez. “I do not want to hurt Matt Shields, you understand, but I think that maybe he and the girl were prostitutes. They’d been here with Mr. Donne a long time. When I found him, he had no clothes. And the girl, she never wore clothes either. After Mr. Donne died, Matt didn’t know what to do, had no place to go, so he just stayed on. I gave him a shirt, a pair of pants, a job to keep himself fed. Then, some people from the state came and cleaned out the house. I would have offered him a room, but I have daughters and their reputations to consider. Matt said he’d saved up some money and it was time to get help. My daughter, Marina, drove him to the bus. You’re the help he went to find.”
Evan felt sick, but he didn’t show it. Couldn’t afford to let his own dark memories cloud his judgment. “Not prostitutes. They were captives, kidnapped and held against their will.”
“I didn’t know.” Sanchez turned his face away, but not fast enough. Evan caught the shame in his eyes, and in the downturn of his mouth. He hadn’t tried to help.
“There was nothing you could do,” Evan assured him. “And we don’t know what else Donne was into—he might have killed you if you’d tried.” It was true, but he felt irrationally angry that Sanchez hadn’t tried. Six hundred fucking years of people looking the other way—it made him sick to be human.
Sanchez looked up, let Evan see that he appreciated the effort but knew what he should have done. “You think he killed her? Donne, I mean. Did he kill that girl?”
“I can’t say.” Evan picked his way carefully through an answer, thinking about a screaming box with a daemon inside for sale to the highest bidder. “But I’ll do what I can to solve this case for Matt, and for the girl.”
Sanchez nodded, one sharp tip of his head, accepting Evan’s word as it was given, “Guess you’d better get busy,” he said, and dropped the key into Evan’s hand. “Leave it on the hook by the kitchen door. I’ll be back to pick it up later.”
He turned away then, opened the door of the Prius but stopped, his arms crossed over the top of the door. “One day, when I was working in the side garden, Mr. Donne warned me to stay away from the girl, and from Matt. He said they only looked human, but were monsters he was trying to tame. He said they refused even clothing. I told my daughter this, and we decided that Mr. Donne, he’s a little crazy, you know? An old man, and maybe he likes boys in his bed, as well as girls, but cannot face his own sins.
“But I ask myself, could it be true, Mr. Davis? Did I bring a
monster, like Mr. Donne said, into my business? Let a demon from the pits of Hell work beside my own son—”
“Matt Shields is not a monster,” Evan answered quickly, though once he would have thought so. “And he certainly didn’t come from the pits of Hell.”
“But?” Sanchez prompted. And because Grayson Donne’s house was waiting for him, and because Donne had drawn Matt Shields from the second celestial sphere to do unspeakable, degrading things to him, Evan dropped his head and answered as much of the truth as he thought Sanchez might be able to handle. “He’s here because someone pulled him out of his home against his will. All he wants is to go home. Can you understand that, Mr. Sanchez?”
“Do you know where I come from, Mr. Davis?”
It was an odd question, and Evan wondered if he’d understood. “Mexico?” he guessed.
“No, Mr. Davis.” He looked at the house for a long minute, then he sighed. “They always come for you at night, because no one is watching then. No one can help you.
“There were others. Mostly young. Even pets sometimes, but animals live in the woods and young people leave small towns like ours all the time On the television, they always find bodies, blood—something. We never did. Parents would put up flyers in the nearby towns and in the city, but the ones who disappeared never came home.”
Evan didn’t know what to say to that. He wasn’t in an absolution mood and didn’t think Sanchez would accept it if he was.
“Tell Matt I will do anything I can to help.” Sanchez tapped the top of the door to the car once, emphasizing his offer, and ducked his head, got in and drove away.
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